Okay, What Were The 80's Really Like?

[Orange]

Now I was born in '91 so I missed the 80's obviously, but anything I have heard made them sound pretty great, but I have a feeling that they weren't really as great as they sound. So for those that were alive in the 80's, does the media get it right that it was a decade of pure bliss, or was it just like any other decade?

[Milkman Norm]

What makes you think they weren't as great as they sound/

[Klutch]

They were a glorious time. Its something you can never take away from me. I won't let that go.

[DiBiase is Good]

It was a decade of greed.
It was a decade of bad hairstyles.
It was a decade of terrible fashion styles.
It was a decade of "cheesy" pop music. Although looking back people realise how good the songs were (especially when compared to the crappy pop nowadays).

But even after all that, it was a decade of pure awesomeness!

[slasher911]

Awesome movies, god awful everything else.

[The OP]

A lot of people starved to death while others spent money on Popples and Wuzzles.

[Grendel]

It was an awesome time, but the threat of total obliteration by The Soviet Union was always hanging over our heads.

[theryno665]

Everything was neon.

And I mean EVERYTHING!

[The Booty Disciple]

Iron Maiden
Judas Priest
Motley Crue

I'm not gonna say that they're the end all be all of living, but musically, those three bands coming into prominence make it good for me. Like any decade, I think there was a fair amount of nostalgia. We all tend to forget the bad, and remember the good. There were plenty of good things to come out of the '80s, and plenty of bad things too. I wouldn't say it's "better" than any other decade, but hey, a decade which gave us Ghostbusters and the Breakfast Club can't be all bad, can it?

[Citizen Snips]

Mar 27, 2010 20:43:34 GMT -5 Grendel said:

It was an awesome time, but the threat of total obliteration by The Soviet Union was always hanging over our heads.

Until we celebrated the end of the 80's by kicking their asses once and for true! USA! USA! USA!

Also, we had the GOOD version of "We Are the World". No Autotune needed!

[DiBiase is Good]

Mar 27, 2010 20:49:35 GMT -5 Citizen Snips said:

Mar 27, 2010 20:43:34 GMT -5 Grendel said:

It was an awesome time, but the threat of total obliteration by The Soviet Union was always hanging over our heads.

Until we celebrated the end of the 80's by kicking their asses once and for true! USA! USA! USA!

Also, we had the GOOD version of "We Are the World". No Autotune needed!

There's a good version of We are the World?

[Back to being Cenanuff]

Space Shuttle.
U2, Michael Jackson, Van Halen, Van Hagar, David Bowie with Queen, hair metal, rap music hitting the mainstream.
The economy bounced back...bigtime.
Transformers, GI Joe, Thundercats, Silverhawks, Voltron, Robotech.
Good times.

[Non Banjoble Tokens]

You missed a lot. That was the decade of the robot uprising. The Johnny Five army that almost wiped out the entire human race, but luckily the dream team of John Rambo, John Matrix, John McClane, Martin Riggs, Axel Foley, Snake Plissken, Action Jackson, and Howard The Duck were able to stop them. We were able to repopulate the world by taking Roddy Piper and using his DNA to father millions of children.

[Hulkshi Tanahashi]

It was great!

Except for John Lennon dying, AIDS, The Challenger, Iran-Contra, terrorist bombings in Beruit, The Russian-Afghanistan War, high percentage of homeless people, people starving in Africa, Aparteid still going on, Noriega, Momar Kodafi, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Chernobyl, the Berlin discotheque bombing, the bombing of Libya in retaliation, the Falkland Wars, the 1982 Lebonan War, Tienanmen Square, Mount St. Helens, the earthquake that interrupted the 1989 World Series, Len Bias, Reagan getting shot, Pope John Paul II getting shot, Ben Johnson getting busted for steroids, the video game industry nearly dying, Exxon Valdez...

Okay, so there was bad shit that happened in the 1980s. But, that's true of every decade. Bad shit happens.

[Back to being Cenanuff]

So many great movies. ET, the first three Indiana Jones movies, two of three Star Wars movies, Arnold Schwarzenengger, Die Hard, Steven Seagal, JCVD, it was just a great decade for movies.
And let's not forget that computers became affordable.
And there was this little thing called Wrestlemania.

And the Bengals went to the Super Bowl...twice.

[mattperiolat]

As a child of the 80s, here's what I remember, in no particular order:

- the outbreak of the AIDS crisis
- Michael Jackson's "Thriller"
- 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles
- Reagan's second term
- kick ass weekday cartoon blocks (Go Bots, Transformers, GI Joe, Thundercats, He Man, She-Ra, Robotech)
- Super Friends cartoons
- Two Star Wars sequels
- The Neverending Story
- Flight of the Navigator
- Challenger disaster
- Baby Fae, an infant who survived over a month on a baboon heart
- Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling, which begat Saturday Night's Main Event and my love of pro wrestling
- glasnost and perestrokia
- Madonna going nuclear
- Chernoybol
- The discovery of the wreckage of the Titanic
- Mom bringing home our first VCR, followed shortly by the Apple IIe
- ET
- Voyager II's flyby of Uranus
- Hands Across America
- Short Circuit
- Police Academy
- Rocky single handed beating communism and making the world safe for democracy. Twice. Once with fists, the other time with a machine gun.
- Conan the Barbarian
- The rededication of the Statue of Liberty
- The hostages freed from Lebanon
- Iran-Contra
- A drunk captain causing the largest oil spill in human history
- US and Russia working together to save three gray whales trapped in the ice near Alaska
- My first Winter Olympics in Calgary, where I learned to love figure skating beyond Ice Capades and how a speed skater could break your heart
- Summer Games in Seoul, home of the worst boxing tournament in human history
- The fall of the Berlin Wall
- Pan Am 103
- The end of the Reagan Era
- Realizing just how long a decade was on New Year's Eve 1989

[Chainsaw]

Mar 27, 2010 20:42:18 GMT -5 The OP said:

A lot of people starved to death while others spent money on Popples and Wuzzles.

And Cabbage Patch Kids.

That's about as accurate a description as I've ever heard. It was a great time to be a kid, and/or rich, but if you were on the opposite end, not so much. I remember being a kid who loved going to the toy store, but because of the escalating arms race between the US and Soviets, I also had to go to bed every night worrying about the possibility of nuclear war too (thanks a lot, The Day After.)

Also, naked ladies in the 80's were awesome.

[Orange]

Mar 27, 2010 19:51:35 GMT -5 Milkman Norm said:

What makes you think they weren't as great as they sound/

Because anything I hear (media wise and all of that kind of stuff) only focuses on the positives, which does happen with every decade due to nostalgia. I just wanted to know what it was like to actually grow up in the 80's, and what it was like with everything going on then

[Paco]

Find a torrent of VH1's "I Love the 80's". Fun retrospective there.
Personally, I loved growing up in the 80's. Perfect decade for a kid.

On the other side of the coin, I just saw "Hot Tub Time Machine" and John Cusack's character sums up the 80's as "Reagan and AIDS" but, like it's been said, most of us were kids growing up during the decade so the big problems did not affect us much.

[Deleted]

Take away all the "modern" stuff (computers, portable phones, etc), watch only 80s shows/movies, and listen to only 80s music, there's the 80s, lol